I’m amazed that there are still yahoos out there debating this. She thinks that slavery was a distraction? If she looked at the statements of succession from the states who succeeded, she’ll find slavery listed. Also, the South was not devoted to States Rights. They once tried to get Constitutional protection for slavery, not only for themselves, but the entire nation, including states where it was illegal. They didn’t embrace States Rights until it became clear that the majority of the nation opposed it.
Here’s another fact the author didn’t mention. Abraham Lincoln could not have exploited the South because they succeeded before he even became President. Lincoln tried to appease them. He offered financial restitution for slave owners. He was even willing to tolerate slavery in the Southern states, albeit it reluctantly. They didn’t like the fact that he wanted to outlaw slavery in any future states to join the Union.
When the South succeeded, they had military bases which belonged to the nation they succeeded from. Those bases had not been built with southern money. If the South wanted to possess them, they had to buy them. But they wanted to take them, lock, stock, and barrell. Also, to cover the spark, it wasn’t the Union soldiers at Fort Sumpter who fired the first shot.
There’s a question of what would have happened if the South had won the war? I don’t believe that we would have won the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The United States would have been a second-tier power on the scale of Great Britain, France, and Germany, and the South would have been a Baptist Banana Republic.
There will always be extremists who second guess the obvious. In most other countries, they wouldn’t even have the right to do that.
Here we go again. The war consisted entirely of the North invading the South. It is the motives of the North alone that are important in analyzing the causes of the war. The war could have ended any time the North decided to let "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" actually happen somewhere.
Yes, slavery was used as a rallying cry to get support for secession in three of the state declarations of secession. But the main issues were the tariff and the victory of the Republican party, a party that publicly declared itself to be "a party of the North pledged against the South."
BS! Texas didn’t even secede until after the Kansas massacre by the fomenting abolitionists. That’s why they put slavery in their document. In fact, Texans were already pissed that they’d been sending taxes to Washington DC and were receiving no help (sound familiar?) whatsoever against the border raids across the Rio Grande! The feds put one puny unit at Fort Davis! Texas seceded legally because they had no use whatsoever for Washington DC!
In fact, Lincoln in his arrogance and greed didn’t care what anyone else thought...he didn’t care that 3.5% of the population would be killed off in his Civil War...not to mention that Lincoln was a total racist who touted that slaves should be free, but should never consider themselves equal to whites,should not intermarry, NOR SHOULD THEY EVER BE ABLE TO HOLD PUBLIC OFFICE! His big idea was to round the Africans up and put them on ships outta here!
Lincoln was a predator, and he wanted the wealth of the tariffs from south because his industrial north could not compete with a wealthy south whose coastal border was vast and who had the corner on world trade shipping!
This mess all started because of that unpleasantness with your Majesty, the Good King George III. Had a few agitators and rabble-rousers not been able to force the nation into revolution, there would have been no NEED for a civil war to abolish slavery.
I call for rapprochement with the United Kingdom, posthaste.
” If she looked at the statements of succession from the states who succeeded...”
Just a thought...if you looked at the statements of the Amnesty support squad 100 years later, you might likely think it happened because of racism and persecution by we US citizens. The civil war happened for a lot of reasons for different people in different places.